August 2024
I’m meeting with the 4th grade team in a school in Washington state when we hear, again, a heartbreaking wail from a child, this time from a very young child, coming from somewhere near the principal’s office. No one seems to be able to calm the child and eventually the principal and special educator leave our meeting to help the child find a sense of calm and safety again. Anyone who has been in schools in the last several years can, sadly, conjure the sound of a frustrated, frightened child striking out at… at what? Their teacher, other students, the principal, parents, the world?
In another school across the country, I’m chatting with a school counselor who has the school dog sitting quietly on a leash next to her. We’re talking about the effectiveness of “dog intervention” in their school. She describes how, often from the moment she and the dog find a child in a “meltdown”, the child calms and changes his or her focus to the dog. I’m delighted to hear how well this is working. The only problem, she finds, is that there are far too many calls for help from the dog than she can possibly respond to in a day. There need to be more counselors, more dogs, or best, fewer children in pain.
Children are struggling; perhaps that is an understatement. We can speculate about how the need became this acute; certainly, there have always been children in pain in our schools, but this is different. This is far more intense for far more kids. What is going on? We each have a litany of sources; Covid, over-protective families, under-protective families, childhood trauma, bullying, undifferentiated instruction… I’ll save for another time, a deep dive into the statistical realities of children’s well-being in a post-pandemic world. Suffice to say that you have not been imagining things; kids are less well than at any time in nearly 25 years.
This is part of what troubles me; teachers are not therapists. I have an undergrad degree in psychology. Does this make me capable of intervening when children are in acute distress? It does not. School counselors and social workers are trained to respond to children in distress, but as my colleague mentioned, there simply aren’t enough of them to meet the need. Principals I know tell me that on many days, north of 80% of their time is spent intervening with children in distress, but like teachers, they often lack the training to offer effective support.
So, what do we do? Not surprisingly, the response to children struggling with social and emotional issues gets punted back to the classroom teacher. We vacillate between programs intended to support children who are suffering and are asked to attend a day or two of “training”. Is that enough?
You know what we are qualified to do? Teach well. You have spent a career, whether it is long or short, understanding and adapting instruction to engage children. I have been so fascinated by engagement, I undertook four years of research in classrooms around the country watching for engagement and talking about it with teachers and kids. It resulted in Engaging Children: Igniting a Drive for Deeper Learning, K – 8. I’ll cut to the chase here. We do know how to engage children, we do know how to teach deeply and well, how to differentiate for a wide variety of needs, and I don’t need to tell you that academically and emotionally engaged children are far less prone to emotional distress.
In many ways, I wish Engaging Children had come out post-pandemic rather than in 2018. I think teachers would read it from a very different point of view, with today’s challenges in mind. That is one of the reasons I’m re-writing it for an audio book and possibly for a second edition. My central question is simple: how can we use what we know about student engagement to prevent some of the social and emotional crises we encounter today? How can we be more intentional about engendering academic and emotional engagement?
I’ll start with the simplest of ideas. We can talk to them explicitly about what it feels like to be engaged, we can share examples of our own engagement, we can help them feel more agentive about their engagement by labeling what engaged people do! Are we trained to recognize engagement? Yes! Are we qualified to adapt instruction to enhance student engagement? Yep! Can we recall examples of deep engagement from our own lives to share with kids? You bet! We can help students become aware and in control of their own engagement, and yes, I know what you’re thinking, even for our youngest students!
In Engaging Children, I proposed four pillars of engagement, the first two of which are intellectual and emotional engagement. Let me share a quick definition for each:
Engagement is born of intellectual urgency. Engaged children often tell us through talk and action that they “have to know more about” a topic. They are willing to put time and considerable effort into learning more. They drive the learning with their own questions. Often, conflict is embedded in the experiences, concepts, and stories in which children are deeply engaged. We’re drawn to conflict and lean toward a resolution. Children are intrigued by conflict and may want to act to mitigate a problem in their community or the world. They believe that they just have to apply more attention to this text or idea.
Engagement is often born of an emotional resonance to ideas—engaged children can describe experiences when a concept is imprinted in the heart as well as the mind. They are far more likely to remember the idea when a strong emotion is tied to a concept they’re learning or a text they’re reading. They may want to share their emotional reactions through writing, conversation, or art.
Okay, so that sounds about right, but how do we get them to engage intellectually and emotionally? In my next newsletter, I’ll share questions I developed specifically to spark discourse about engagement in your classroom. We are the most qualified people to prevent social and emotional distress in children, right there in our own classrooms. I also encourage you to spend some time thinking about all the ways that you become engaged in your life inside and outside of school. Get ready to share insights about how you become engaged as a launching place for rich discourse with kids, far greater engagement in the work you do together, and kids who find solace and stimulation in your classroom.
